Past Editing Work

Here are a couple videos I've put together for editing courses:

This first one is of footage from the film "Dream Catcher." (2008)

Dream Catcher from Jenn K on Vimeo.

This second one is a short documentary I put together from beauty pageant footage my professor gave us to work with. (2008)

Beauty from Jenn K on Vimeo.

Visual FX Final Project

Well here is the final product for my visual fx and motion graphics course. We had our class screening a few days ago, and all the projects were really good. You could tell a lot of hard work and many hours went into making them. It's cool to see how everyone has developed over the semester.

I'm pretty satisfied with my project. Many, MANY hours went into making this, along with 2 all-nighters, 12 cups of coffee, 3 different songs, clips out the wazoo, and color keying and masking til the cows came home. There are probably a few things I would fix up or change if I had more time, but overall I'm happy with the outcome. I got a few compliments at the screening which makes me even more proud of my work and that all those hours were worth it.

Here's to a long, sometimes frustrating, but awesome semester with this course. I've learned a lot a will definitely keep learning more.

You've Been iPod Commercialed from Jenn K on Vimeo.

Final Project. Finito.

I got my project in on time and with several hours to spare, hooray. Gotta love all nighters. I'd like to add that I was quite surprised to see no one else in the control lab all night until about 10am. Guess everyone else was keeping up to speed on their stuff. But it's finished. My project didn't quite turn out how I originally intended. I ended up scraping my idea for a slightly different one, using a completely different song, and some different footage than I was going to use in the original plan. Not much else change though. I still created my ipod-esque video, just without all the intended transitions. The color key was the toughest and most tedious part of this whole process.

I had planned on doing a simple color key effect in after effects to wash out the green screen behind my dancing subject. Only alot of the clips unfortunately were not done in front of green screen. So i had to go in frame by frame and mask out everything, which took a hell of a long time. If there's an easier way, my mind wasn't seeing it at 3am in the morning. So please do leave a comment if you know one. I'd appreciate it for next time.

So I keyed all my clips and put solid color layers behind them, as seen on regular ipod commercials. I threw in some signature ipod ad moves, like making three people from one, having two different dancers in the same clip, etc. That was easily done by copying my layer, pasting it and re-positioning and re-scaling it to my liking.

Then I proceeded to make my song file into a waveform to fill in a couple gaps and have it play with some of the clips as a little something extra. That process took a little over 45 min with the help of a videocopilot tutorial. Thank you Andrew :) I was unsuccessful at first because Ae didn't have the option for "Particular" so I got a free trial to use it for my project. Worked out well enough. The bass and treble levels didn't move as drastically as I had hoped with my song, but it works well enough for me. Looks pretty cool. I'll have to play with that effect again sometime.

Rendering luckily didn't take very long because I kept rendering everything I did as soon as I did it and didn't leave it for the last minute. And if you don't already do it, as a piece of advice, save every time you do something. I'm glad I do, because in trying to plug something in, I unintentionally turned off the computer and it shut down. Needless to say, I panicked, but all was well. Then came the exporting process and putting it on the transfer server.

The only behind the scenes stuff I can really describe is the waiting around for over an hour to get a computer in the control room lab on campus at one point. After that it was essentially smooth sailing. You know, sans the 18 hours I spent in the lab due to unforeseen frame by frame keying. That really set me back. Um, Guadalupe gets wicked insane after a Longhorn win like we all saw this past Saturday night. I myself jumped up and down and high-fived a stranger on the street, yelling "hook 'em" and "yeah!" before high-tailing it up to the lab to work. Good times. And my last bit of BTS is, cake balls... not so good after they should have been eaten three days prior. (Cake balls, for those who don't know, are basically cake pressed into balls, covered in hardened frosting, with sprinkles on them. Yes, I agree, they sound delicious. Well they normally are, just eat them after you first make them. Not 5 days later. My bad.)


My video will soon be posted on here. But for now, I must study for a final. Never a break is there... Until then. Peace.

Audio Production Final Project

This is for my audio production final. We had to take a 1-3 minute video from youtube, strip the audio, and redo it all ourselves, using music, dialogue, sound effects, foley sounds and ambiance. I chose a Tomb Raider Legends bloopers reel and tried to get as close to the sounds as I could. I think it turned out pretty well. I just wish the video didn't look as condensed as it does, but that could not be helped. Luckily it's more about the audio than the video :)

341 Audio Final Project from Jenn K on Vimeo.

Final Project

Pitch:
A dance inspired video much in the style of ipod commercials.

Proposal:
A video highlighting interpretive and break dancing, masked in an ipod commercial-like way, and set to the song, "Return to Innocence." As the music becomes more grandeur, the dancers become more entwined.

Timeline:
1. find videos of different interpretive and break dancers.
2. import videos into editing software program to rearrange in a timeline and cut down to preferred length.
3. sync video to audio and add in transitions.
4. import timeline into after effects and mask different dancers on different background colors.
5. add special effects (particles, fire, explosions, etc) to dancer's movements.
6. render and export.

Particles

Fireworks from Jenn K on Vimeo.

this was tough to come with an idea for. i thought fire, maybe teleport someone, then i decided to go with a simple fireworks display. I started off with a solid black layer for my background. Then i brought in the particle systems effect and began to mess with it by decreasing the rate and longevity. I set my particle type to line, because fireworks kind of shoot off in lines, so that was my logic. it looked pretty fine to me compared to some of the other presets. once i got it the way i wanted, i duplicated it several times, spatially moved them around and resized a few to be smaller and larger, then added a saturation/hue effect to color correct them -- magenta, blue and green.

Motion Tracking - Mercy

So this assignment wasn't too bad. I toggled between a few ideas and tried them out and failed at the actual tracking before settling on this one. I captured a clip of someone holding their cell phone. Tracked the movement of the phone with two points and added a null object. After applying the points to it, I added in my music video clip of Duffy's "Mercy," scaled it down to fit the screen, and parented the video clip to the null object. This process wasn't working for me the few first times and I had to start over completely every time, but I eventually got it to work. After that was all done, I decided to color correct the footage to make it pop a bit.

Green Screen - Jedi Battle

How did Jordan and Marcy get mixed up in a Jedi battle? And what has made them enemies? I guess we'll never know. But in this scene we see their epic battle and one unfortunate warrior meeting and untimely demise...

So first, I went through all the green screen footage the class shot. Thinking about what I wanted to do, I had the genius idea of putting these two dueling girls into a battle scene. I initially thought, Revolutionary War, or Nam, or something... but then, the light bulb flashed. Star Wars Jedi battle. Oh yes.

I ripped and cut scenes together from this fight scene in Episode II, and cut some parts out of the green screen footage in Final Cut. I also made some lightsabers in Photoshop to add into the final clip as well.

I layered the star wars clip, the green screen clips and the lightsabers in Ae. I colored out the green to get the two girls in the action, then scaled, positioned, rotated the lightsabers in the girl's hands to show them fighting.

The colors were not blending very well together, so I decided to add a Hue/Saturation effect to all the clips and lowered the reds and blues. It really brought out the lightsabers, and I thought it looked pretty cool.

Green Screen - Jedi Battle from Jenn K on Vimeo.

Text

Titles from Jenn K on Vimeo.

This thought came about because I've wanted to come up with a name for a production company. Well, I came up with one... but this isn't it. This idea came about because while thinking of a name, I knew I wanted to make my text explode with fire. (because who wouldn't want to do that?) So in using fire, I tried to think of a name that would correspond with the fire, and came up with Extra Flamey Productions.

The process involved layering my fire explosion and text layer. I color corrected both to appear blueish (which I thought looked really cool in comparison to the normal red/orange/yellow fire. Third choice would have been green.) I dissolved between the fire and text to make it a smoother transition. Then to get the fire out at the end, I reversed my original clip. And that's all folks.

3D City

My initial idea didn't come to pass, so I ended up just creating a 3d city and maneuvering a camera up and around it. There's some slight jerkiness to it that I didn't intend, but sometimes, working on a slow computer can do that.

This is, What?...

In celebration of October 1, which was more convenience than planned, my vid has a kickback to nightmare before christmas. Of course, now i'm going to have this song stuck in my head for the next 2 weeks...

I animated my pumpkin with the puppet tool. It was very tough to get it to match with audio in after effects, especially since my audio was acting up the whole time. But I like to think it passes, because how well can a pumpkin really enunciate while singing? I added in several ghosts, creating them from shapes flying out of the walls and changing into their ghostly selves, and flew them around the room.

Air Battle

Air Battle from Jenn K on Vimeo.

15 minutes spent brainstorming on what to title this project, and my creativity levels at close to midnight weren't very high.

I quite enjoyed making this project. Working with these programs and maneuvering through them are becoming alot easier. For this project, I went with an airplane fight in the sky to show an array of movement, rotation and scaling. But of course they couldn't be regular planes, so I made them paper airplanes. More fun that way. After layering the planes and background, it took me a tedious amount of time positioning, rotating, and scaling each plane to get my final product. I added in some gunfire, an exploding climax, and a couple of paratroopers to finish it off.

Sadly I didn't include audio, but maybe I can update that in the future...

Just Another Night...

Just Another Night... from Jenn K on Vimeo.

First After Effects project i've even done. It was interesting trying to maneuver thru this program. Several tutorials later and this is the product i ended up with.

I started out with 6 stills that i drew myself. Yes, i know, i'm no artist. Scanned them in the computer, and fixed them up with photoshop. This project helped me alot with photoshop, so that's good. I'm getting more used to that now. After importing the stills into Ae, i lined them up in the timeline and added some dissolves between slides, and made my character move from one point to another while driving her stake thru the vamp's heart. All in all, this project was alot more stressful than it should've been, but pretty much turned out how i wanted it to. So i'd call that a success.

I'd also like to add that the concept and audio of this project belong to J. Whedon, Mutant Enemy and FOX. I am using this for school purposes only.

When Night is Falling

First project of the semester-- to create an original layout in Photoshop --which was not a labor of love. More like a labor of hate and anger. Mostly because of having to learn a program I have never used before. Idea after idea, swear word after swear word... and here is the final product. My picture shows a split image between night and day. I kind of just had that idea stuck in my head for days and just ran with it. A few layers, contrast and color adjustments, additions of a howling wolf and some gravestones, and much more tedious laboring brought me to this.

Supernatural Promo

Supernatural Opening from Jenn K on Vimeo.

This is an opening credits sequence for Supernatural that I made for a promo competition a few years ago.

All About Me

Hello, my name is Jennifer Kovacs, but you can call me Jenn. What's there to say... I am a radio-tv-film student at the University of Texas at Austin. I am currently in my final year of college, of which my last semester will be spent in L.A. doing an internship program thru the university. I have no idea what I will do in life after college, however my goal is to work in a post-production house and become an editor for television shows and films, and potentially creating trailers for films and television series. My dream is to one day work on a project with one of my idols, Joss Whedon (the man behind Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, and the new series Dollhouse, among many other things).

My major hobbies and interests include watching excessive amounts of television, editing videos, anything involving the Whedonverse (look that up if you don't know what that is), playing sports of any kind really, and learning to play the guitar.

I initially had no idea what I wanted to do when entering college. Prior to acceptance, I had it in my mind that I would study architecture because it interested me greatly, and I really liked the idea of creating houses and buildings. However, I fell into the field of film, with zero prior experience, never really working with film equipment much before or software of any kind, and after getting some experience with cameras and editing any material I got my hands on, I came to love it. Editing has become a passion of mine. I couldn't direct or produce for a living if my life depended on it, nevermind running audio or lights either. I'm a post-production gal. I am a perfectionist at heart when it comes to editing, which is why I feel it's my calling. Just the idea of creating the final product of what the audience will see is fascinating and desirable. I just want to create things, specifically television shows, that people will enjoy and want to come back for more.